The book serves as a continuation of the author’s previous book, “Plots of Russian Literature” (1999), and its theme, stated in the title, formulates, in fact, the same task from the other side, from the active point of view of a philologist. The outline of the book brings together works spanning 40 years, but most of them were written in recent years and were not included in the author’s previous books. The thematic spectrum is wide and varied - works about Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Boratynsky, Tyutchev, Tolstoy, Leontyev, Fet, Chekhov, Khodasevich, G. Ivanov, Proust, Bitovo, Petrushevskaya, as well as about “philologists of our time” (the name of one of sections of the book) - M. M. Bakhtin, L. Ya. Ginzburg, A. V. Mikhailov, Yu. N. Chumakov, A. P. Chudakov, V. N. Toporov, and articles of a general theoretical nature..